The Donald Trump regime hasn’t banned me from writing this column — at least I don’t believe so — but top government officials have made it clear, from the president on down, that in their eyes what I’m about to say is dangerous and un-American.
In a series of speeches, tweets, and decrees from the Oval Office, the regime insists that the existential threat to our national way of life isn’t from troops in the streets of American cities toting assault rifles and tear-gassing peaceful citizens, but from protesters or writers like me calling that behavior out for what it really is.
Fascism.
The president, Vice President JD Vance, and their minions have seized on the actions of a few young, lone-wolf assassins to issue blanket condemnations seeking to vilify and, in essence, ban free speech that accurately describes America’s downward spiral into autocracy.
“This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE” — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — “to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to ‘Nazis,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social after a deadly sniper attack against a Dallas ICE facility. “I AM CALLING ON ALL DEMOCRATS TO STOP THIS RHETORIC AGAINST ICE AND AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT, RIGHT NOW!”
Trump tied that threat to a September executive order in which the president declared antifa — which is an ideology, not an organized group — as a terrorist organization, a pretext for going after real left-wing groups and people who fund them. “Antifa” is short for “anti-fascism” and a belief that urgent, even radical, means are necessary to keep this brand of dictatorship from taking root. Trump, in his memo, attempts to rebrand anti-fascism, writing that “these movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as ‘fascist’ to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.”
“If you want to stop political violence stop attacking our law enforcement as the Gestapo, if you want to stop political violence stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi,” Vance declared in a speech in North Carolina on the same day as Trump’s post.
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This isn’t some arcane dispute over language. The Trump regime is desperate to control the words of America’s political conversation because they want to normalize what they are doing right now, which is pursuing a rapid race to demolish democratic norms and institutions. Vance’s goal in his North Carolina speech is really to lump the most outrageous comments online with the bulk of legitimate dissent about the outrages that are happening right now from Chicago to the Caribbean.
“The success of Trump’s plan depends on how we see it, or rather, whether we choose not to see it,” historian Timothy Snyder, who recently left Yale for the University of Toronto, wrote in a new op-ed. “In the worst case, Americans choose not to notice, look away as their neighbors and coworkers are swept up in immigration raids and their cities become militarized, and then pretend that they had no other choice but to abandon democracy.”
Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, and other historians of authoritarian movements have been writing for a decade on the strong similarities between Trump’s MAGA movement and the classical fascism that took roots in parts of Europe in the 20th century.
“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
The Columbia University history professor and expert on World War II dictatorship Robert O. Paxson wrote that in his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, back in 2004, or 11 years before the president descended from the escalator at Trump Tower. But the hyperlinks are all from America’s dystopian present.
It’s critical to the success of the MAGA enterprise that when Trump, in an unprecedented yet rambling and monotonous address to more than 800 military commanders, describes the new mission for American soldiers as “the enemy within,” that you do not label this as “fascism.” Even if the commander-in-chief’s words trace back directly to Joe McCarthy and carry alarming echoes of Joseph Stalin.
Whatever you say, do not make any comparison to Nazi Germany when a small army of federal agents wearing military-style fatigues shoot flashbang grenades and rappel down from a helicopter to stage a dead-of-night assault on a South Side Chicago apartment building with 800 residents — separating children, some of them naked, from their mothers and dragging them into U-Haul vans. They don’t want anyone who has read The Diary of Anne Frank to ponder immigrants hiding in their attic in 2025.
No wonder that when U.S. troops use drones to obliterate civilian vessels on the high seas and slaughter every human being on board, officials like self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth race to brand the victims as “narco-terrorists” and some type of enemy combatant. The implications of accurately describing these attacks — as the president of the United States openly ordering murders, without any due process and in violation of any and every known law, yet shielded by a rogue Supreme Court — is too monstrous for many to comprehend.
Which is exactly what they’re going for.
Experts on the subject have known since the worldwide ruin of World War II that controlling the language is central to the fascist project, from George Orwell warning about “freedom is slavery” doublespeak to a 1945 U.S. Army pamphlet that proclaimed: “An American fascist seeking power would not proclaim that he is a fascist. Fascism always camouflages its plans and purposes. … It would work under the guise of ‘super-patriotism,’ and ‘super-Americanism.’”
As Trump’s masked and unbadged secret police (and we absolutely should be calling them this) escalate their tactics by firing tear-gas canisters onto city streets, aiming projectiles at journalists, and arresting political leaders or slamming them to the ground, it is absolutely essential that we defy Trump’s executive order and call this by its real name.
The reason is simple: Defeating fascism requires a very different type of posture — both politically and morally — than might an old-fashioned political quarrel between liberals and conservatives over tax rates and government services. To truly oppose a fascist Trump regime, we must declare ourselves anti-fascists. In light of Trump’s order, we must become outlaws.
In a recent essay for Liberal Currents, Samantha Hancock-Li writes that it’s time for Democrats clinging to the old rulebook to toss it out the window. Too many, she wrote, have “ceded the field because they are too afraid to fight on it. They cling to the fantasy of regular politics. They don’t want to fight on this new field because they are afraid of losing. That fear will kill us. Peacetime is over. If we want to win, we must embrace war mindset.”
Too many lawmakers, and journalists, refuse to understand the fascist moment because their salary depends on not understanding it. But I’ve been struck this weekend by how one prominent political figure is actually getting it — properly framing the current government shutdown as more than a squabble over healthcare but a fight for democracy.
“Listen, I don’t think we’re asking for too much in that we are telling the president that if you want us to sign onto a budget, it can’t be a budget that funds the destruction of our democracy,“ Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told the New Republic’s essential Greg Sargent last week. ”I would be a sucker to agree to a budget that literally funds an operation to hunt me and my allies down — to imprison us, harass us, intimidate us.”
I believe that many and probably most Americans would support Murphy and that level of resistance if they understood the urgency of the fascist moment, and that the similarities between Germany in the early 1930s and the United States of today are piling up. That’s why Team Trump is trying to scare you off this conversation.
Things have only regressed so far. It’s 1933, not 1939. It’s horrific that militarized cops are firing projectiles at working journalists, or that a reporter covering ICE raids in Atlanta can be arrested and deported to El Salvador. But they haven’t worked their way down to schlubby white boomer columnists — not yet — so I’m going to use the might of this keyboard until they take it away.
Words still not only matter, but have incredible power. What we are witnessing is American fascism. I am an anti-fascist.